Impressionism for Robots

To impress both critics and ordinary people, a painting must be understandable. We should see something personal in it or be fascinated by the story of its creation. Even though roboart is currently experiencing a period where it can evoke applause and amazement at where new technologies have led us, people are not quick to admire it. Robots are more feared. Will anything change when a machine starts to paint in the most beloved and understandable artistic style for a simple human being — Impressionism?

"What kind of impressionism can a machine have?" you might rightly ask. My name is Vladimir Tsimberg, I am the founder of Robohood Inc. We taught robots to paint — they create real oil and acrylic paintings on canvas. In this article, I will explain how the work of our robots is reminiscent of the work of Impressionist artists, and why such painting expands the creative potential of humans, rather than replacing their work.

There are similarities in the stories of the emergence of Impressionism and the emergence of robot artists. For example, at the very beginning of their journeys, both faced the obstacle of a turbulent river of sarcasm, misunderstanding, and mistrust. The painters sought changes that the Academy of Arts did not want to accept. Now, robots and artificial intelligence are viewed with fear and suspicion since they cannot be artists without feelings, perception, and creative thinking.

What is Impressionism? "Impression I was certain of it. I was just telling myself that, since I was impressed, there had to be some impression in it — and what freedom, what ease of workmanship! A preliminary drawing for a wallpaper pattern is more finished than this seascape!" wrote one of the first critics of Impressionism, Louis Leroy, in his scathing article commenting on Claude Monet's painting "Impression, Sunrise."

Leroy found this style of writing careless and disrespectful, and the term "Impressionists" took on a rather offensive connotation. The participants in the "Salon des Refusés," the young artists who organized the exhibition, began to call themselves Impressionists in protest, signaling their disdain for the critic's article.

The artists of this movement sought to capture the beauty of the minute, to freeze the fleeting moment in the here and now. The powerful influence of Japanese culture on Europe played an important role. They had "ukiyo-e", a term that can be translated as "floating world". In these prints, Japanese artists depicted the transience of the surrounding reality. The Europeans worked similarly. They wanted to move away from the ideas of classicism and realism, to breathe real life into their paintings as it was.

For this purpose, they started painting without clear contours, using large and chaotic strokes with their separate application, abandoning glaze — applying translucent colors over the base — and also avoiding mixing colors on the palette. This last point is a key feature of the style. Instead of using a palette, Impressionists mixed colors directly on the canvas. They made sharp, deliberate strokes to make the scene look both generalized and soft. That's why Impressionist paintings are best viewed at a short distance to get a sense of their intent.

The Robotic artist creates paintings using exactly this technique. The robot's style incorporates the principles of classical impressionism and a combination of algorithms and neural networks. It can be called neuroimpressionism, a reflection of today and Industry 4.0. It is currently facing the same criticism that impressionists received for their strokes and narratives. One could recall Damien Hirst's words: "People don't like contemporary art, but all art begins as contemporary." Perhaps that is the curse of any new movement.

You will ask a logical question: if impressionists literally painted what they saw every day, conveying their emotions inherent in specific moments, how can a machine do the same? For a robot, digital images serve as its very nature, from which it creates works of art. While a person looks around for a landscape, the robot derives this information from a photograph. This is a major stumbling block: critics of artificial intelligence in art and robotic artists firmly believe that the robot cannot be an impressionist without being able to be impressed.

But these arguments are not entirely fair. To paint a picture today that resembles cave paintings, or that depicts something similar to ancient Egyptian drawings, we don’t need to be a cave dweller or a resident of the Nile Valley. The same is true of Impressionism — we can use the methods and techniques of that style of painting without being an Impressionist. In our case, without even being a human.

The Robotic artist does not have the goal of being a second Van Gogh, Monet, or Pissarro. Only they could be themselves. We are fortunate to some extent to reduce their experience to an algorithm and use it.

However, this imitation of the classics can give robots a lot of attention to their paintings and make people fall in love with their art. The algorithms mimic established artistic techniques by incorporating principles used by painters. If we inspect each Robohartist’s painting, we can see other styles besides Impressionism: expressionism, driven by the desire to evoke strong and mixed emotions in the viewer; abstractionism and its subconscious elements; and even academism with the traditional technique of layered painting.

At the same time, painting in a single specific style is a technological limitation, but we are working to improve color mixing patterns and use all available directions. This applies not only to the technical part but also to the ideological part. We all learn from someone. In painting, we focus on established styles and techniques, later we bring something of our own to painting. Behind the mechanical shoulder of the robot, there are also a huge number of hours of machine learning, with more to come.

Robots, in collaboration with artificial intelligence, can embody the narratives of artists whose styles are programmed into them on a much larger scale! The "brain" of artificial intelligence contains an immense amount of data, and it is beyond the human capacity to learn and remember everything in a lifetime. What we see, our perception of the world, is still limited. Artificial intelligence and advanced technologies give us the ability to access diverse information in infinite quantities. Robotic artists can help us see the sides of art and ideas that were previously unavailable to humans.

For example, by gathering all the knowledge about Van Gogh's paintings, teaching an industrial manipulator to reproduce the brush strokes in his style, and replicating the strokes close to the artist's technique, we create new portraits imbued with the spirit of that era. These portraits of Van Gogh by Roboartist made the strongest impression on the audience because they found themselves close to this manner of painting. They saw the face of the person in the picture and correlated it with the artistic style inherent in Van Gogh.

In developing the technology, Robohood set out to empower artists. Now, some painters are using our robots as assistants in their studios. They help complete routine tasks so that a human can focus on creativity, on coming up with new ideas. By the way, using artificial intelligence to find new concepts and plots is also a common practice. The built-in neural network can serve as a source of inspiration and generate references. All this gives us a chance to look at the world from a different angle.

Most artists are absolutely unwilling to accept technology and robots in their work. It is their right to do so, just like their colleagues have the right to use these tools. These two camps can coexist in the same coordinate system. It all depends on the preferences of a particular artist, but we cannot deny the influence of digital technologies on art.

Walter Benjamin explained the position of critics of AI in art as early as 1936 in his work "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction", that the more the value of any art declines, the fewer viewers and critics criticize it. Conversely, the newer the art, the more it is subjected to criticism with greater repulsion.

Robots need time to adapt and gain acceptance, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't use them early. People did not take impressionists seriously at first, but now they admire and find inspiration in their works. If Manet, Renoir, Cézanne, and Degas had abandoned their idea after the "Salon des Refusés" and given in to academicism, Impressionism would probably have come later. The same goes for robots. One day we would have come to it, anyway.

Every era has its own means of expression. While the Impressionists used their painting style to describe life around them, the Robotic artist shows what's happening in our time — the dawn of high technology and artificial intelligence, robots, and machine learning. It's not necessary to depict exactly these subjects in paintings; what's important is how and with what our contemporary life is depicted. Doesn't it resemble an impression?

Is human creativity disappearing? Click the picture to read our article on the robohood.com.